N. S. Shaler

“The African and European races must ... both march forward with entire equality of privilege as far as the state is concerned, yet without the bond of kinship in blood to unite them in the work of life, — indeed, with a sense that it is their duty to remain apart.”

“The insensate greed of our ancestors took this simple folk from their dark land and placed them in our fields and by our firesides. Here they have multiplied to millions, and have been forced without training into the duties of a citizenship that often puzzles the brains of those who were trained by their ancestry to a sense of its obligations.”

“When this volcanic dust ceases to glorify our skies at dawn and eve, we shall part with what has probably been the most remarkable and picturesque accident to the earth's physical life that has been known with the limits of recorded history.”

“Each successive enlargement of man’s progressive desires has made him more and more an agent of change, until now his most advanced races are causing more change in the ways of the earth than all the other organic agents put together.”

“Peculiarities of place, which have served so great a need in offering a choice to the selective forces that have elevated man, are still of invaluable use in giving the variety of characteristics that are required in the endless adaptations necessary in the making and keeping of a nation.”

“The earth rocks to and fro; from its recesses there come the most appalling sounds; in an instant cities are shaken down, mountain summits are hurled into the sea, the rivers change their paths, and the ocean, as if to complete and cover the ruin the land has made, rises in an enormous wave and sweeps the shore.”